The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Author: Tom Jeffreys

  • …these little queer ciphers…

    …these little queer ciphers…

    A Q&A with Jenn Thompson and Ellis, co-founders of Cipher Press, a new independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction.

  • Gold and Guano

    Gold and Guano

    “Thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth,” wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Geophilosophy, an essay published in their 1991 collection, What is Philosophy? Standing right up close to the works of Giancarlo Scaglia, I wonder if that same strange place – somewhere between territory and earth – is where…

  • The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static

    The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static

    I write from Edinburgh, from a flat enveloped by the haar, a cold fog that comes in off the sea and whites out the world. The fog binds land with sea and sky. It feels like an apt place and time from which to respond, briefly, to two recent books by JR Carpenter – The…

  • Keep the Ink Moving

    Keep the Ink Moving

    The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? His work taps the frequencies that thrum, seldom heard, through the worlds we inhabit: not only the mundane technologies of contemporary existence (the overhead crackle of electricity cables, the whirr of the motorway, the view through the…

  • Ghosts on the Shore

    Ghosts on the Shore

    Identities – of people and of places – form slowly over time, through the sedimentary accretion of multiple overlapping layers. Even the oldest or most deeply buried stories never entirely disappear. Sometimes it takes the archaeologist, or the psychoanalyst, to do a little digging. Paul Scraton’s Ghosts on the Shore enacts a sustained process of…

  • Corbel Stone Press: On Translation

    Corbel Stone Press: On Translation

    Run by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, Corbel Stone Press is one of the most distinctive small presses around today, whose work spans books and journals, pamphlets, booklets and music. Their focus is on landscape, nature, and ideas of place – mostly through poetry, but also across painting and drawing, botanical illustration, sound and song….

  • Editorial: Wolf Crossing

    Editorial: Wolf Crossing

    Look into the eyes of the wolf. What does it see? On 29th August 2016, shortly after the announcement of Steve Bannon’s appointment as Donald Trump’s new campaign CEO, The New Yorker ran a cartoon by Paul Noth. It shows a large billboard standing in a field of grazing sheep. Upon it is a wolf…

  • Zone de sécurité temporaire

    Zone de sécurité temporaire

    There is a strange but commonly used French phrase with no precise parallel in English: entre chien et loup – between dog and wolf. It refers to twilight, when the light has dimmed and one can no longer differentiate between a wolf and a dog (as if it were once so simple to tell the…

  • Little Island Press

    Little Island Press

    Little Island Press is an independent publisher of new and classic poetry, fiction and international literature in translation. Inspired by some of the amateur presses of the 1920s, Andrew Latimer founded Little Island Press in 2015. Its output spans three different series: Memento, which presents the work of overlooked modern poets; Transits, which offers poetry…

  • Revisiting Unknown Places

    Revisiting Unknown Places

    The art of Maria Pääkkönen concerns itself with a reciprocal relationship between drawing and place. On the one hand is the drawing of the place – that which is observed, recorded, remembered, evoked. On the other is the place of the drawing – its physical presence within the confines of the gallery. Somewhere in between…

  • Reliquiae

    Reliquiae

    If writing is an act of preservation, it is a flawed one. Words change their meanings, books rot, papers burn, whole libraries are lost to time. The longevity of a text is therefore as much a result of material history – and chance – as it is of any inherent truth or beauty. Nonetheless, the…